I want to be clear from the outset: this piece isn’t trying to attack your summer barbecue or perhaps that admittedly delightful elote from your favorite taqueria. This is about the approximately 90 million acres of American landscape that we’ve surrendered to a single crop—a monoculture so vast it’s visible from space, so politically entrenched it’s practically untouchable, and so environmentally destructive it makes you wonder who the hell thought this was a good idea. Welcome to the American Corn Belt, where we’ve managed to transform one of the world’s most productive agricultural regions into an ecological disaster zone in the name of… what, exactly? Cheap livestock feed and a fuel that doesn’t even work as well as gasoline? Fantastic.
Here’s a fun math problem that should infuriate anyone who may have both a calculator and a conscience: gasoline is significantly more efficient than ethanol as a fuel source. Specifically, one gallon of gasoline equals approximately 1.5 gallons of ethanol in terms of energy output. Let’s put this in practical terms. If your Toyota Camry gets a respectable 30 miles per gallon on gasoline, that same vehicle would manage only about 20 miles per gallon running on pure ethanol. Already, we’re operating at a significant efficiency deficit, but it gets worse.
Consider a cross-country drive from Los Angeles to New York—a distance of 2,774 miles. Research from Cornell University demonstrates that one acre of land yields approximately 7,110 pounds of corn, which can be processed into 328 gallons of ethanol. That’s roughly 26 pounds of corn per gallon of ethanol. Now do the depressing arithmetic: to fuel that single coast-to-coast trip on ethanol, you’d need to dedicate a substantial portion of productive agricultural land to growing fuel instead of food. And for what? A less efficient product that requires vast inputs of water, fertilizer, and fossil fuels (oh yes, the irony) to produce.
The ethanol mandate, propped up by decades of agricultural subsidies and lobbying from the corn industry, represents one of the most spectacular policy failures in modern environmental history. We’re literally growing fuel that performs worse than the petroleum it’s meant to replace, all while pretending this somehow addresses our climate crisis. It’s performative environmentalism at its most absurd, and it’s costing us far more than just money.
While the ethanol debacle provides ample material for outrage, the water situation in corn country presents an even grimmer picture—one that threatens the long-term viability of American agriculture itself. Water availability across the U.S. Heartland is critically limited, particularly in the High Plains, Midwest, and Mississippi Embayment, where demand consistently exceeds supply. This isn’t a temporary drought situation; this is structural overextension of a finite resource.
The quality of available water compounds the scarcity problem. Surface water throughout these regions is heavily contaminated by fertilizer and manure runoff—the inevitable consequence of industrial-scale corn production. Groundwater faces contamination from both natural sources and agricultural pollutants, rendering significant portions of the total water volume effectively unusable even when the numbers suggest adequate supply. We’re not just running out of water; we’re poisoning what remains.
In the Central High Plains, the situation grows more dire. Altered natural flows resulting from reservoir management and water diversions have further constrained reliable access to water resources. We’ve engineered ourselves into a corner, fundamentally disrupting hydrological systems to support an agricultural model that demands more water than the region can sustainably provide. The Ogallala Aquifer, which underlies much of the High Plains and supports roughly 30 percent of the nation’s irrigated agriculture, is being depleted at rates far exceeding natural recharge. When that runs dry—and it will—what exactly is the plan?
The corn system persists not because it makes environmental sense, economic sense, or even logical sense, but because it makes political sense. Iowa’s outsize influence in presidential politics ensures that no serious candidate will dare challenge corn subsidies or the ethanol mandate. Agricultural lobbies have spent decades and billions of dollars constructing a policy framework that treats corn as infrastructure rather than a crop choice. The result is a system that privatizes profits while socializing environmental costs, with future generations left to deal with depleted aquifers, degraded soil, and a destabilized climate.
Industrial agriculture defenders will argue that we need corn for food security, livestock feed, and energy independence.
But let’s examine what we’re actually securing: a brittle monoculture vulnerable to pests, disease, and climate variability; an inefficient fuel that costs more in resources than it returns in energy; and an environmental debt we have no credible plan to repay.
The point of this isn’t to convince you that corn itself is evil—it’s a plant, for fuck’s sake—but rather to highlight how catastrophically we’ve organized our agricultural and energy systems around a single crop that cannot sustainably deliver what we’re demanding from it. We’ve converted 90 million acres of diverse prairie ecosystem into an industrial monoculture. We’ve drained and polluted aquifers that took millennia to fill. We’ve mandated the production of an inferior fuel that requires absurd quantities of land, water, and energy to produce. And we’ve done all of this while patting ourselves on the back for supporting “renewable” energy and “American farmers.”
The first step toward solving a problem is accurately naming it. So here it is, plainly stated: our current corn system is environmentally destructive, economically inefficient, and politically calcified. It represents the triumph of lobbying over logic, short-term profit over long-term sustainability, and political expediency over ecological reality. Until we muster the political courage to fundamentally restructure agricultural policy and end the ethanol mandate, we’ll continue trading water we can’t afford for fuel that doesn’t work, all while pretending this makes environmental sense.
Fuck corn. Or more precisely: fuck the system that made corn king.
P.S.: If you want to read more about this you should check out the book Perilous Bounty by Tom Philpott (He’s a lot smarter than me and goes a lot more in depth on the topic)
References
Economic Research Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture. “Feed Grains Sector at a Glance.” Accessed December 10, 2025. https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/crops/corn-and-other-feed-grains/feed-grains-sector-at-a-glance.
HowStuffWorks. “How Much Corn Does It Take to Fill a Gas Tank?” Accessed December 10, 2025. https://auto.howstuffworks.com/fuel-efficiency/alternative-fuels/question707.htm.
U.S. Geological Survey. “Water Availability and Use Science Program: Where Is Water Availability a Concern?” Accessed December 10, 2025. https://water.usgs.gov/vizlab/water-availability/02-water-availability.
Economic Research Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture, “Feed Grains Sector at a Glance,” accessed December 10, 2025, https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/crops/corn-and-other-feed-grains/feed-grains-sector-at-a-glance.
HowStuffWorks, “How Much Corn Does It Take to Fill a Gas Tank?” accessed December 10, 2025, https://auto.howstuffworks.com/fuel-efficiency/alternative-fuels/question707.htm.
U.S. Geological Survey, “Water Availability and Use Science Program: Where Is Water Availability a Concern?” accessed December 10, 2025, https://water.usgs.gov/vizlab/water-availability/02-water-availability.
